Every morning a guitarist wakes up … and doing the warm-up!

The warm-up is a very important step of a musician’s daily routine: a simple set of progressive exercises useful to predispose muscles and articulation for more complex movements and stretching.

Today I propose my own set of warm-up exercises.

Usually i use this exercises also with beginner students: it are useful also for becoming familiar with the fretboard and fingerstyle.

All exercises need to be performed with the metronome and each pattern must be repeated on all the fretboard.


Simple chromatic scale

This exercise need to be performed holding all four fingers on the string after the corresponding note was played.

The right hand fingering is different between ascending (p-i-m-a) and descending (p-a-m-i).


Chromatic scale with ‘string skipping’

Same suggestions of previous exercise (hold all fingers on string), but a bit more complex with a big jump from a string to another.


The ‘Spider’

A well-known exercise, useful for finger independence and coordination between the two hands.

I suggest to start the exercise very slow, in order to correctly memorize the pattern.

The ‘sweep’

Inherited from electric guitar technique, the ‘sweep’ is an exercise opposite to the ‘chromatic scales’: the final purpose is playing all notes as an arpeggio, but ‘staccato’, without holding any previous note.

The right hand fingering is a simple p-i-m-a-m-a-m-i pattern.


[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN639zWXKHE[/embed]


All exercises on a single PDF